


Game Night In Mistral: TABARZIN 20,000: MegaArmy Long-Rangers

by Kiiratam



Series: Game Nights at Beacon Academy & Beyond [17]
Category: RWBY, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Background Relationships, Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Light Angst, Poorhammer, everyone has PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:08:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23355190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiiratam/pseuds/Kiiratam
Summary: This game night, once again, there is Only War. Just at a smaller scale than last time. Only Battle, really. Only Skirmishing. Only seven kids trying to relax, and mostly succeeding.Takes place during Volume 5, between Chapters 8 and 11. (My BMBLB fic index)
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos, Lie Ren/Nora Valkyrie, Ruby Rose/Weiss Schnee
Series: Game Nights at Beacon Academy & Beyond [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1482323
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	Game Night In Mistral: TABARZIN 20,000: MegaArmy Long-Rangers

"Okay, I figured we were getting a little tired of Astral Derelict." Jaune set the box down at the head of the dinner table. The sounds of the lower tiers of Mistral drifted in through the windows.

  
Ruby scoffed. "As if! I'm still not at max level!" She darted her eyes at Oscar. "But, uh, we don't all have Astral Derelict, so we can do something else."

  
Weiss looked down at the table. She _also_ didn't have the game (and she couldn't really afford it now), because she'd always been busy with vocal practice, and extra research, and writing study guides, and the study groups she ran with Blake... Instead of playing a game with her friends. Who she hadn't really missed until she was back in Atlas. Alone with her family. Alone.

  
She looked up at her friends, gathered around the table, as Jaune passed papers out to everyone.

  
"So those are the basic rules, and I didn't have any dice, but-"

  
"I brought mine!" Ruby vanished in a whirl of rose petals, ruffling everyone's papers.

  
Jaune continued, relatively unperturbed. "-but I figure the rest of us can use the dice roller app Yang uses." He looked at Yang, his eye catching, like all of theirs did, on her new arm for a moment. "What was it, 'Power Word: Die?'"

  
"It's 'Never Say Die.' It's pretty good."

  
Everyone pulled out their scrolls, Nora huffing a bit. "I dunno, I'm gonna miss shaking the dice."

  
Yang smirked. "Just get a glass of ice. They sound pretty similar."

  
Ruby swirled back to the table, setting down her dice bag with a _clunk_. And Weiss blocked out whatever punnish violence to the language Yang was perpetrated, as Ruby set a dice bag in front of her.

  
_Her_ dice bag. The one she'd bought for Ruby's F&F game. The one she'd left back at Beacon.

  
Weiss looked at Ruby, trying to blink away the wetness in her eyes. They were just dice. Nothing worth weeping over. She just touched Ruby's shoulder, drawing her attention, and smiled at her.

  
And Ruby just returned her smile, and turned back to listen to Jaune. Because it _wasn't_ a big deal. Just Ruby being her friend.

  
Blinking a few more times, Weiss refocused on Jaune. Slowly taking her blued-steel dice out, and arranging them as she listened. She'd almost forgotten how beautiful the icy designs on them were.

  
"It's still a **TABARZIN 20,000** game, and it's kind of on the same scale as Astral Derelict, but instead of Astral Knights, we're playing MegaArmy Special Forces. Well, one branch of them, they've got like three. But we're all playing a squad each, tops, and some of us are only playing an officer, or something. Anyway, everyone other than Nora is probably tired of Vorpalites-"

  
"How can you tired of something so _cute_?" Nora leaned on the table, sighing. Ren patted her shoulder.

  
Jaune kept ploughing forward. "So the enemies tonight are Siriusians, who have ray-guns and mecha and drones and all kinds of super advanced Atlas-y tech."

  
"And they explode like melons when you squeeze them!" Nora mimed crushing a melon - or a head - between her hands.

  
"Crush lots of melons, Nora?" Yang asked, leaning on her new arm.

  
"How else are you supposed to get to the juicy bits?"

  
"Aaaaaaanyway," Jaune was at least _trying_ to get to the point. "We'll roll for our mission once everyone chooses their unit. Or character." He held out another sheet of paper to Oscar. "Um, as long as its you and not Ozpin. I don't think that's fair."

  
Oscar took the sheet. "I, uh, think he's asleep."

  
Ruby nodded, whispering loudly, "You know how old people are."

  
Not responding to that - unless intensifying his search of the paper counted - Oscar cleared his throat and said, "I've never played anything like this before."

  
"Oh, uh..." Jaune scooted around to peer at the sheet over Oscar's shoulder. "So this tells you how many people you'll have, and here's how good you are at shooting, and-"

  
Dropping her eyes to her rules-sheet, Weiss skimmed through it. It was more or less the same as the game of **TABARZIN 20,000** (she hated that it was capitalized in her head now) that they'd played back at Beacon. Obviously, because everyone had a lot fewer models, the game would go faster - though she did notice that the cover rules in this system were much more detailed. They spent an _awful_ lot of words establishing what counted as line-of-sight, which meant that there had been some furious fights about that particular subject. There was also a system for locating enemies, narrowing them from contact icons, to general locations, to exact position. Overall, it rewarded having someone to spot for you. Which fit in with what Weiss had read about city fights during the Faunus Rights Revolution - _finding_ the enemy was half the battle. Which meant that the Sirusians having drones was worrying, since it could give them location fixes.

  
"I think I'll just take the squad of laser rifles. They seem simple." Oscar passed the sheet of paper down the table to Nora.

  
She glanced at the sheet, cackled, and said, "Super Raptors."

  
"Excuse me?" Weiss _must_ have misheard.

  
Nora slid the sheet to Ren, and put her elbows on the table, leaning in to focus on Weiss. "Okay, pretend that you're a mad scientist, and the MegaKingdom has banned human and faunus experimentation. But you're, like _craaaaaazy_ , so you make dinosaurs from DNA trapped in mosquitoes trapped in amber - except it doesn't _really_ work because there are holes, but you just shove some dog DNA in there, because who doesn't love dogs?"

  
Weiss nodded, missing Zwei. The rest of it was complete balderdash, but everyone did love dogs.

  
"And because, again, you're _craaaaaazy_ , you add jaw-mounted grenade launchers to your resurrected raptor-dogs, which, because they're smarter than you expected, means they blow you and your lab to smithereens, and then run off and join the military, because they're still not _that_ smart."

  
"Nora." Ren looked up from the list.

  
"Okay, fiiiine. They crave structure because they're pack predators, and they've got naturally occurring and possibly-vorpalite-DNA-originating bio-grenade launchers, so they would make really bad civilians, and in the grim darkness of the twentieth millennium, there is only war, so it's not like they could get secretarial jobs."

  
Weiss decided, for the sake of not having Nora explain any more, that she was going to accept this. She nodded, and Nora sat back in her chair.

  
"Covert action team." Ren handed the sheet across the table to Yang.

  
"Knives and snipers, huh?" Yang scanned the sheet. "Um, Macca the Partisan sounds cool. Sis?"

  
Ruby took it. "I just want to explode stuff."

  
Nora shrugged. "I feel like that all the time."

  
Yang snorted. "We know."

  
"Ooooooh, this'll do. Las and Mas, the Blaster Brothers!" 

  
Ruby's excitement told Weiss everything she needed to know. At least they were all on the same side. Weiss accepted the sheet when Ruby handed it to her, but asked Jaune, "Are you running the opposition?"

  
"Nah, the Siriusians are nerve-stapled, so they aren't super inventive or anything - I mean, unless there's a Wollenstern General, but that's mostly an excuse to make them actually playable, kind of like the Gestalt is an excuse for why the Vorpalites can-"

  
Weiss was trying to hold back her sighs, because she definitely wasn't going to get a simple answer. Or even a complete thought. But she had been trying not to interrupt as much, especially when it was stuff her friends were excited about. Like Ruby and her weapon rants, or Nora's everything, or this sort of thing from Jaune.

  
But Yang cut in, "Jaune? Briefer?"

  
"Oh, right, sorry." Jaune looked up, backtracking through his thoughts. "The Siriusians are run by a program. You can do it manually, but I've got the app for it."

  
Nodding, Weiss looked over the sheet. They didn't have too many characters yet, so she could choose one of those. And if there was anything the _last_ game of **TABARZIN 20,000** had taught her, it was that she was better with fewer units. Weiss knew she had a tendency to micromanage, but in a game, that could be an advantage. So long as she didn't try to do too much. "The artillery spotter hero, Captain Din, looks interesting." She glanced at Ruby, looking for... approval? Weiss didn't know, and trying to psycho-analyze herself using a game was probably a bad idea.

  
"Yeah, she was the other explodamancer I was looking at, but I thought her abilities really fit your planning skills, so I went with pew-pew instead." Ruby smiled and nudged her. "Besides, then we can be explodabuddies!"

  
Weiss took last look at the sheet before handing it to Jaune. "We're getting our own copies of our character sheets, yes?" Captain Din's abilities hadn't been in the same sort of precise language as the actual rules sheet. She suspected summarizing.

  
"Oh, yeah, this is just the unit selection sheet." Jaune started digging in his box, pulling out papers and the folded paper miniatures they'd used last time. "Let's see-" He went clockwise around the table, handing out a ten-body rifle squad to Oscar, a three raptor pack to Nora, a trio of special operatives to Ren, a lion-Faunus with a hammer to Yang, a pair of heavily armed troopers to Ruby, and a motorcycle-riding officer to Weiss. And then five figures to himself.

  
Ruby leaned past Weiss to look at the paper minis. "What are you playing?"

  
"Shieldsworn. Basically bodyguards." He passed a few more sheets to Oscar. "Nora, can you two roll up the mission? I'm going to get the terrain."

  
Weiss studied Captain Din as that was happening. The other sheet hadn't said anything about a motorcycle - but she had been using very mobile Aeldauphin last time, so the high movement speed hadn't registered. She looked at Ruby's character sheet, and saw that the Blaster Brothers' movement was about half of hers. Weiss wasn't really sure how much like Ruby's game this was going to be. Should she start trying to think like Captain Din of the MegaArmy Long-Rangers? The sheet she was reading had two paragraphs about her history, and personality. The highlight of which was 'Captain Din is crazy and lucky enough that when she calls in 'immediate suppression, on my position', no one questions it.' Which was deeply alarming. Because it meant that Weiss' character had done it _multiple times_. And, obviously, survived.

  
She decided that she probably wouldn't be able to think like the 'real' Captain Din, but that didn't mean that she couldn't try to use all of her abilities. Captain Din had a motorcycle, a laser-spear (probably not worth firing), excellent spotting abilities (which made sense), and the ability to call in mortar attacks, light artillery strikes, and heavy artillery strikes. The mortar attacks were more or less immediate - the rules said they were from mortar teams nearby, just off the playing field - but the artillery took longer to arrive. The light artillery hit right before her next turn, and the heavy artillery hit right after her next turn. Enemies would have time to move out of the way - which could be helpful if she was trying to disperse an attack.

  
The important thing was to use her mobility and spotting skills. The blast templates for artillery fire weren't so big that she could just fire blindly and hope hit something.

  
"Who _wrote_ this?" Yang was glaring down at her sheet. "Jaune, I'm just going to ignore all of the background info, because it is _garbage_."

  
Jaune poked his head out the pantry, his arms full of boxes and cans. "What?"

  
Yang waved her sheet at him. "Macca. His backstory is all about how he's big and dumb and angry, and - grapes, did they run this by a single actual Faunus? Because this is terrible."

  
"Oh boy." Nora sighed, looking down at Oscar's scroll and the mission generator. And then seemed to take in that there was another conversation going on, and quickly said, "Buuuut that can wait!"

  
Setting his armful of dry goods on the table, Jaune started arranging them. "I mean, it's all out of the book, Yang."

  
"The book can bite me. I haven't seen anything this bad since that Tenebrous Remnant book that-" Yang paused. Took a breath. "That Blake hated."

  
Toying with a label that was starting to come off a can, Jaune clearly wanted to be done with this conversation. Because, Blake wasn't here, and Weiss knew that Jaune, like all of them, was thinking about the other person who wasn't here.

  
Weiss glanced up in the silence. At Oscar, who was just looking around the table in slight bewilderment. Caring bewilderment, but...

  
She had assumed Professor Ozpin had filled him in. Maybe not. Or maybe he thought it was just about the fall of Beacon, and didn't know everything about JNPR. About Pyrrha.

  
Clearing her throat, Weiss broke the silence. "Intelligence isn't measured in this system. And my character's description says she's a risk taker, and that wasn't how I was going to play her at all."

  
Ruby sat a little straighter. "Yeah, it's just fluff, sis. It doesn't really matter."

  
"It **does**." Yang said it with a great deal of heat. While Weiss replayed fights she'd had with Blake in her mind, about media representation, and stereotyping, and-

  
"-I mean, it matters, but it doesn't matter for the rules." Ruby's hand touched Weiss' under the table, and Weiss grabbed hold of it. Squeezing tightly, hoping that Yang was holding onto Ruby's other hand.

  
Yang blew out a breath. "Okay." After a moment, she asked, "So what's the bad news, Nora?"

  
"Soooooo." Nora doubled checked the mission generator. "It's a VIP extraction."

  
Most of the table groaned. Weiss looked at Ruby, eyebrow raised.

  
"It's an Astral Derelict thing. The VIP AI for that is - it's like -" She let go of Weiss' hand to try to catch the words by making aimless gestures. "Like walking Zwei, only there's a squirrel- and fire hydrant- appreciation parade going on."

  
"Oh." It may have taken Ruby a second, but it was evocative.

  
Oscar dug out a sheet from the pile. "It doesn't look _that_ bad." How did he know who Zwei was, but not understand - Weiss thought about that for _longer_ than half a second, considering the difference in conversational inertia between talking about beloved pets and dead friends. Oscar had kept talking. "-then we can attach them to a unit, and they'll follow along."

  
"Guess that's my job." Jaune had his scroll out, and was trying to arrange the boxes and cans into something resembling a street grid. "Ren, can you get the big wok? I think it'll work for the downed shuttle."

  
"We can plan, right?" Ruby looked over the cityscape taking shape before her. "That's not against the rules?"

  
Comparing two boxes of noodles, Jaune said, "I mean, we're all in the same regiment. I don't know that all of these exact people have worked together, but we've got a commonality of service, and stuff."

  
"No, I mean, the actual rules. The game rules."

  
"Oh." Jaune set one of the boxes in place. "Why would they?"

  
Ruby shrugged. "I dunno. Sometimes cooperative games have stupid rules like that, because if you actually plan things out, the game's too easy."

  
Snorting, Nora said, "Nah, you can make all the plans you want. The dice just aren't going to cooperate. At least, it never does for me and Jaune at tournaments."

  
"We can try, at least." Ruby had grabbed a couple of her dice, and was weighing them in her hand. "Oscar, can your squad split into fire-teams?"

* * *

  
"Got them." Weiss removed the contact icon from the top of the can of pork and beans, and Jaune replaced it with five Sirusians. 

  
He looked around the table. "Anyone else doing spotting?"

  
A ragged chorus of negatives. Understandably, everyone else was saving their actions to shoot back. Now that Weiss and Ren had spotted the ambush. 

  
Oscar started moving his fire-teams forward, on both sides of the main street. "They were using the VIP as bait. We need to get to them, now that they're no longer useful." 

  
"You're charging pretty far ahead..." Nora had her hand poised over her raptors, trying to decide what to do. She moved as far as she could after Oscar's men. "Um, aimed shots towards the jerks on the Porky Bean. Frag." She rolled. "Two on target, five hits from those. Three wounds."

  
Jaune tipped three of the figures over.

  
Ren pointed at the same group. "One shot. Hit, two wounds." He nodded at Yang, as Jaune struck another Sirusian down.

  
Standing up to get a better angle, Yang said, "Okay, inferno-jumping up here-"

  
"Wrong building, sis."

  
"If I was just going to wade in, sure. But here I've got cover against the inevitable _next_ squad." She pulled out a blast template. "And I've got a flamethrower-hammer."

  
As Yang rolled everything out, Ruby said, "I still don't get why they didn't give Macca a spear. I mean, a partisan for a partisan? They don't usually miss a pun." Weiss and the rest of the table gave her blank looks. "You know, a partisan? Not quite a trident, but more than just a winged spear?"

  
Weiss shook her head. "Not all of us have made an exhaustive study of polearms, Ruby."

  
"I mean, I wouldn't call it _exhaustive_ -"

  
Yang nudged her sister. "These Sirusians are extra crispy. Your turn."

  
"Aww, man, those were the guys I had an angle on." Ruby moved the Blaster Brothers forward, after Oscar's rifles. "I guess I'll blow up whoever shows themselves next." 

  
Weiss had spent her turn spotting, so she motioned to Jaune. He moved up on the opposite side of the street. "Oscar's got a point. They don't have any reason to keep the VIP alive. If we get close enough, maybe we can draw their fire." He typed a few things into his scroll. "Okay, the single Sirusian left here is falling back. So they're going to get added to the reinforcement pool in a couple of turns. And contact icons and shooting from..." He placed four icons down on top of 'buildings.' "And we've got drones teleporting in behind us." He set a few clusters of gun-toting drones down by the extraction point.

  
Ruby thunked her head into the table. "Of course they have tele-deployment. They're aliens. From space. With space magic."

  
As Jaune figured out who had been fired on, Ren looked at the drones. "I can take some out, but I'm the closest target to them."

  
"I can get back to you and mortar fire them." Weiss hadn't been sure how to use her mobility in this close terrain, but she knew now. Fire support for everyone. "And Nora's raptors are mobile, she can come back if we need more firepower."

  
"And that's most of the western fire team taken out - Sorry Oscar - and one of my shield guys on the other side. And a wound on a Blaster Brother."

  
Without raising her head, Ruby marked that down.

  
Nora sighed. "Every time, the plan goes straight to heck."

* * *

  
"I'm dead." Yang sat back in her chair. "Macca killed his enemies too hard, and now he's not in melee. So those guys have a perfect shot." She pointed at the squad overlooking the shieldsworn, the rifle troopers, and the VIP. "And so do these guys, _and_ these guys." She indicated two more groups, on top of what everyone had been calling the Pasta Emporium. Because it was six boxes of pasta.

  
"I can help!" Ruby pointed at one of the pasta groups. "Rapid fire, all barrels, overcharged. I just have to not roll a one, or it'll blow up. On twelve dice." She started shaking her dice before anyone could object, and cast them. "I can't look. Weiss, what did I get?"

  
Weiss leaned over to check. "No 1s."

  
"Whew! Never thought I'd be grateful Uncle Qrow was out of the house, but..." She peered at her dice. "Seven hits, two wounds each."

  
Yang checked with Jaune, and knocked one of the squads over. "So I'm only dead twice."

  
Smiling, Weiss waved her mortar template in Yang's direction. "Maybe only once. I'd use an artillery strike, but they wouldn't hit until after the Sirusians had fired." She checked the fit of her template over each group, and figured it was safer to aim for the other Pasta Emporium squad. The one threatening Jaune and Oscar's troops was very close to them, and she didn't want to cause a friendly fire incident. Weiss put a die down to indicate the point she was calling in, and rolled on the chart that told her how far off-target the mortar strikes landed.

  
Right on target. From there, it was just rolling out damage, and that was basically perfunctory. Weiss took great satisfaction in knocking all of the miniatures over.

  
Jaune's troops were pinned, but he tried to fire on the last group threatening Yang's character. But the suppression penalty prevented that from being effective.

  
And then it was the enemy turn. Yang had a pen ready to cross out her last two wounds, a resigned look on her face.

  
Jaune input the data into the program on his scroll, and started moving Sirusians, indicating who was firing on what group...

  
...And no one fired on Macca. Even though he was standing out in the open.

  
"I'm not going to complain getting to live for another round, but what just happened?" Yang set her pen down.

  
Weiss replayed the enemy attacks this round in her head, seeing a pattern in the chaos. "...They're too dumb to take advantage of it. They only fire at the closest enemy. I mean, there must be a bunch of other conditionals, but..." She looked at Jaune for confirmation.

  
He shrugged. "I didn't read the manual program. It looked ridiculously complicated, and I knew there was an app."

  
"What do we do?" Ren looked between Ruby and Jaune. 

  
Ruby was rolling a die in her hand. "We forget about killing them, and _aggressively_ decoy. Get to the best cover you can, as close as you can, and make them waste shots on you. And the VIP just hightails it to the extraction point. Then we pull back once they're secure."

  
The downside, Weiss decided, was that the longer it went on, the more the Sirusians were going to get lucky. Or trigger some of those unknown conditionals. And no one on her side was looking good. "Can the VIP just climb on behind Captain Din?" She looked at Yang, thinking of riding tandem on Bumblebee. "It would get them out of the way faster."

  
"Let me see the VIP sheet, Oscar." Ruby held out her hand, and he passed it to her. "I mean, it just says 'can be attached to a unit, in which case the VIP moves and fires at the same time as that unit, under the direction of the unit's controller.' Nothing about how to handle movement speed differences."

  
Yang leaned over, looking at Captain Din's miniature. "There's room on the bike. They even have footrests for a passenger."

  
Jaune shrugged. "I mean, it makes sense to me. It's not like this is An Official Tournament Game or anything."

  
Huffing out a breath, Oscar asked, "So we're going to do something possibly suicidal, and _definitely_ stupid, just so we can maybe succeed in our mission?"

  
"Yup." Ruby threw him a thumbs-up across the table.

  
"Okay." Oscar moved the VIP from the shelter of the wok handle/crashed shuttle, out into the open street. "Everyone else hunkers. All four of them."

  
"I mean, I can't really use cover." Nora's hand hovered over her last raptor. "Buuuuuuuut..." She took a quick measurement, and moved into the midst of one of the enemy squads covering the road back to the extraction zone. "I can just start eating them." She queued up dice rolls on her scroll.

  
Snorting, Yang said, "It's soft cover. Soft, squishy cover."

  
"No kidding! I'm having Macca's problem. There's only one left."

  
Weiss scanned the rules. "It only takes two combatants to make a melee."

  
Nora shrugged. "Well, it's all I have. Ren?"

  
After a moment's consideration, Ren moved his remaining two soldiers up towards the enemy, leaving just a bit of them to stick out from behind cover. Hopefully enough to draw their fire away from the VIP.

  
Yang moved her inferno-hammer-wielding Faunus into the middle of another enemy group. And, talking at her scroll, said, "Okay, I know this is the first time I've ever asked you to do this, but I need you to **not** kill everyone." She tapped a few keys. "Okay, three of them dead, and I'm safe in the middle of the other four." Yang shook her head. "This is so dumb."

  
"It's not dumb if it works, sis!" Ruby left her miniatures in place. "Cooling the guns and hunkering."

  
Measuring out her movement to the VIP, Weiss asked, "Is it an action to pick someone up?" She wasn't sure who to ask. Yang was the motorcyclist, but Jaune knew the rules best.

  
Yang made non-committal noises. "This isn't like F&F, where they tell you it's five seconds to the round."

  
"Um, call it two centimeters of movement? That's what it is to open a door in Astral Derelict." Jaune looked uncertain, but Weiss was going to go with it. It was only a game.

  
"So I get to here, pick up the VIP, and I can make it-" She measured again. "-over here." They'd be in the extraction zone next round. So long as the Sirusians didn't shoot both of them.

  
Jaune's three shieldsworn were still stuck behind cover. But he pulled them out, to stand out in the open, hopefully being another decoy.

  
Ren gave him a worried look.

  
"I've still got my hard light shields. It's not as good as cover, but I've still got the best defenses of everyone. I mean, at least until I get hit. Then I've just got one wound, like all of the non-heroes."

  
Yang looked around the table. "I, uh, think Macca's the only one on the board who still has more than one wound. I mean, Captain Din got clipped by that sniper-"

  
Weiss nodded. "Thanks for getting that one, Ren." He waved it off.

  
"-The initial ambush and a few non-lethal misfires wore the Blaster Brothers down-"

  
Ruby chimed in, "I still _have_ two wounds, it's just that my next wound is going to make me an only child."

  
"-Thanks sis, that makes me feel a _lot_ better." But Yang said it with a smile, which was just an immeasurably huge relief to Weiss.

  
"And my raptors aren't really a _hero_ unit, but they did all start with three wounds, and I'm down to my _last_ wound on my _last_ raptor." Nora started drumming her fingers on the tabletop.

  
Jaune had been typing in more information for the Sirusian program. He looked up, finger poised. "So this is going to be over soon, one way or another."

  
"Yup." Yang shrugged. "We've got practice in a half-hour anyway, so let's wrap it up."

  
It was slightly agonizing, waiting there while a computer rolled dice to see if you won or lost. Weiss went with Ruby's method of coping, and grabbed a few of her dice. Squeezing them, feeling the edges against her palm.

  
One of Oscar's squad died.

  
One of Jaune's too, even with their shields.

  
One of Ren's - not from the enemies he'd taken cover against, but from a drone they'd lost track of, and had reappeared at the worst possible moment.

  
The Blaster Brothers both lived another round.

  
The Sirusian facing Nora's raptor tried to withdraw from combat - but flubbed the roll, and was messily torn apart.

  
The seven facing Macca still had some will to fight left in them, and engaged Yang's character in hand-to-hand combat. They managed to chip away one of her two remaining wounds - at the cost of five of them.

  
And no one fired at Captain Din or the VIP at all.

  
Oscar let out a breath, looked up at Weiss. "You were right."

  
Weiss wanted to say that she had just gotten lucky, that there were probably a lot of factors that she hadn't taken into consideration at all, and-

  
Ruby mussed her hair, "Yeah, she usually is."

  
That felt good to hear. Even if Weiss wasn't going to take it as an invitation to start slacking off, because if she was usually right, it was because she worked hard, and it was only _usually_ , and-

  
She settled on fixing her hair as Oscar's squad retreated back towards the extraction point, double-quick.

  
And Nora pounced on the drone that had ambushed Ren, giving him space to retreat. Even if he didn't take advantage of it, firing on the nearest enemy, dropping two of them. They probably wouldn't survive to extract, but they had that side locked down until they fell.

  
"Okay, **now** we can kill all of them." Yang was talking to her scroll again - or maybe her character sheet. Whichever it was, it was listening. Those enemies gone, she dashed forward into cover. Weiss could see her measuring the distance between her miniature and the extraction zone. And then look around for more enemies. Ruby, not having any good targets, got the Blaster Brothers quick-stepping towards the exit.

  
Weiss did some measuring of her own, stopping long enough to offload the VIP. The mission was a success. Now it was all about getting as many of her team mates out as possible. And killing as many of the Sirusians as she could. "Creeping barrage, from here-" She pointed at the point in-between herself and everyone else. "-to here." She pointed at the edge of the extraction zone. "Heavy artillery." Which meant it would start falling after her next turn. Everyone stared at her. "Well, come on! No last stands, no heroism. I measured everything. We can make it. Run."

  
Jaune double-timed towards the extraction zone, ignoring cover for distance. And, after entering the events of the round, moved more Sirusians up into where the barrage would fall.

  
Ruby frowned. "They've got to be able to hear it coming."

  
Shrugging, Jaune said. "Nerve-stapled. They don't have a choice; they're just following their programming." And then he started passing out the butcher's bill.

  
Two more of Oscar's squad, leaving him with a single trooper.

  
Both the Blaster Brothers were going to go down, but Jaune's soldiers were close enough to interpose their shields, saving them. Ruby sighed in relief.

  
But saving Ruby's men had left the shieldsworn exposed, and both them went down.

  
Ren's last operative went down to a lucky shot.

  
The drone the raptor had been savaging withdrew, and sprayed a wave of bullets at the its attacker. None of which hit.

  
Two fire-teams of Sirusians had double-timed to outflank Macca. They didn't have time to shoot, but next round... Yang could only destroy one of them. If her dice kept cooperating.

  
Oscar withdrew his last trooper to the extraction zone, and looked around for targets. "I guess I'll aim for the drone." He pointed at the one that was menacing Nora's raptor. "Um, one hit, one wound."

  
Jaune removed it from the board.

  
"I was not expecting that to work."

  
Nora slapped him on the back. Lightly. At least for Nora. He only winced a bit. "Can't get stupidly lucky if you don't try!" She moved her raptor to the exit, and pointed at one of the fire-teams menacing Macca. "I want them dead."

  
The dice didn't agree, with the grenade only killing one of them. Ren's face made some eloquent points without him having to say a word.

  
Ruby made the Blaster Brothers run full out, and made it safely to the exit point with centimeters to spare.

  
Yang sighed. "Can't make it past them." She shrugged, and moved her figure into the middle of the group Nora had clipped. "Weiss, what is it with you and trying to kill my characters with area-of-effects?" She tapped her scroll, checked the results, and toppled the four remaining Sirusians over. "First the ice wall and Furioso..."

  
"Oh, stop whining." Weiss moved Captain Din next to Yang. "And get on." She looked up at Jaune. "Two centimeters to mount, right?"

  
He nodded.

  
Weiss measured it again - not because she thought she'd gotten it wrong, but to prove to everyone else that she hadn't. And moved Captain Din and Macca into the extraction zone. "The barrage starts now." And it was going to hit lots of Sirusians. But Weiss didn't feel much need to roll it out, because everyone was either on the extraction vehicle, or lying dead in the field.

  
Jaune let out a long breath. "That was pretty intense."

  
There was a wave of assent around the table, Weiss nodding along with everyone else.

  
"Maybe a less intense game next time?" Ren didn't seem that upset about his unit all dying. But it was Ren. 

  
"But I left Compost King back at..." Jaune didn't finish his sentence.

  
But Ruby was nodding. "Yeah, my F&F books are back on Patch." Weiss didn't know if Ruby was just missing the point, or purposely missing the point to try to move the conversation along, or-

  
"I can run something." Yang shuffled her sheets together, and passed them to Ruby, who added hers and passed them to Weiss. Yang had pulled her scroll out. "I've got a few tabletop games on here, and if we can find a pack of cards or two-" She stopped. "I don't think I want to play poker, but there are other games." She elbowed her sister. "If Ruby's willing to learn anything other than 52 Card Pick-Up."

  
"Hey, I can play War and Go Fish and Solitare and- um, that's it, actually."

  
Weiss passed the stack of papers to Jaune, and looked at Oscar. "Do _you_ know how to play whist?" She already knew no one else did.

  
"Sorry. I can ask Professor Ozpin?"

  
"No, that's alright. We have too many people for one game, and not enough for two."

  
Pushing her chair back from the table, Yang stood up. "I'll see what I can come up with."

  
Ruby matched her. "We should all get ready for practice, anyway. Um, and get our battlefield back in the pantry."

  
It was worth a smile, at least.

  
Nora glanced at Jaune. "Do you want to say it, or should I?"

  
Jaune waved at her, putting things back in the box.

  
She stood up, leaning on the table, and putting on her gruffest voice. "The MegaArmy Long-Rangers have won this battle against the slimy Sirusians. But... **The War is Forever!** "


End file.
